Just to let you know: since 45 minutes or so, ML is available from the MAS. I haven't bought it yet and probably won't until the weekend (and then definitely only install it on my Mac mini). So, if anyone of you have it already, let us know how you fare so far.

"We do what we must, because we can."
"Gaming on a Mac is like women on the internet." — "Highly common and totally awesome?"

New OS for my birthday was pretty cool. For some reason Star Trek Voyager Elite Force in cider was choppy so I had to move it to wineskin but other than that I have no complaints compared to Lion. The auto-birthday from contacts thing that also calculates the age of the person in Calender is pretty neat.

Candybar is broken though so I'm missing having custom folder\system icons. Although the new default dock skin looks kind of like something I would choose to put on via a third party skin so I don't mind it so much.. much better than the older default dock looks for Leopard and Lion.

So far I have noticed Serious Sam 3 BFE has better dynamic shadows at a distance in Mt. Lion. Previously the shadows where kind of grainy at a distance and popped in... not any more.

Only thing I play with regularity on my MBP at the moment is StarCraft 2, and from what I've heard Mountain Lion gives it a pretty good kick in the pants performance-wise over Lion. So I'll be getting ML probably within the next 24 hours.

EDIT: Actually, it might be longer than that. Download is a CRAWL.

"Oh, getting physical media at the store is sooo-o-oo yesterday and takes so long! Downloads are like, totally the future! It's fast and easy!"

Time to drive to the Mall, park, walk to the Apple Store, get a CD/USB drive, walk out of the Mall, drive home, and completely install fresh copy of Mac OS X and reboot with it ready to use on launch day, based on past experience: About 2 to 2.5 hours

Time to download 15% of Mac OS X from Apple on small business DSL on launch day, based on current ongoing experience: 4 hours and counting.

Oh, and if something goes wrong with the install and you need to start over, the installer deletes itself, so HAHA, YOU'RE FRAKKED NOW!

Only thing I play with regularity on my MBP at the moment is StarCraft 2, and from what I've heard Mountain Lion gives it a pretty good kick in the pants performance-wise over Lion. So I'll be getting ML probably within the next 24 hours.

EDIT: Actually, it might be longer than that. Download is a CRAWL.

"Oh, getting physical media at the store is sooo-o-oo yesterday and takes so long! Downloads are like, totally the future! It's fast and easy!"

Time to drive to the Mall, park, walk to the Apple Store, get a CD/USB drive, walk out of the Mall, drive home, and completely install fresh copy of Mac OS X and reboot with it ready to use on launch day, based on past experience: About 2 to 2.5 hours

Time to download 15% of Mac OS X from Apple on small business DSL on launch day, based on current ongoing experience: 4 hours and counting.

Oh, and if something goes wrong with the install and you need to start over, the installer deletes itself, so HAHA, YOU'RE FRAKKED NOW!

The future sucks.

well if you have a slow connection... only took me like 45 minutes to download it.

but anyways, you can leave your computer downloading and go do other things and come back to it tomorrow, rather than wasting a few hours of your time trying to get it... spend 0 hours and do something else and let the computer work for you

No, I don't have a slow connection. I pulled a few gigabytes off Sony earlier today in my quest to reinstall my downloaded data on my new PS3. Only possible explanation is there are either a giant pile of people downloading it right now, so Apple's serving it up slowly, or their connection to me is explicably slow, which seems pretty unlikely that it's only occurring on launch day.

I'm sure if I downloaded it a couple days from now it'd be relatively fast, and yeah, I can walk away and do it later, but that's not the point. Point is in 2012 it takes longer to acquire and install the new Mac OS on launch day than it did 10 years ago, because Apple opted not to have ANY physical copies at all with ML.

I'm sure if I downloaded it a couple days from now it'd be relatively fast, and yeah, I can walk away and do it later, but that's not the point. Point is in 2012 it takes longer to acquire and install the new Mac OS on launch day than it did 10 years ago, because Apple opted not to have ANY physical copies at all with ML.

for some people... maybe. For some people its faster since local stores don't always have stock the first day, or run out. Its also much cheaper than it was years ago. But you still gloss over the whole fact that going to the local store you actually have to spend your own time doing the acquiring, thats a HUGE difference and a great thing about digital copies. This is also not unique to Apple but the whole software world.

Only thing I play with regularity on my MBP at the moment is StarCraft 2, and from what I've heard Mountain Lion gives it a pretty good kick in the pants performance-wise over Lion. So I'll be getting ML probably within the next 24 hours.

EDIT: Actually, it might be longer than that. Download is a CRAWL.

"Oh, getting physical media at the store is sooo-o-oo yesterday and takes so long! Downloads are like, totally the future! It's fast and easy!"

Time to drive to the Mall, park, walk to the Apple Store, get a CD/USB drive, walk out of the Mall, drive home, and completely install fresh copy of Mac OS X and reboot with it ready to use on launch day, based on past experience: About 2 to 2.5 hours

Time to download 15% of Mac OS X from Apple on small business DSL on launch day, based on current ongoing experience: 4 hours and counting.

Oh, and if something goes wrong with the install and you need to start over, the installer deletes itself, so HAHA, YOU'RE FRAKKED NOW!

The future sucks.

Most places I've seen people talk about maxing their connections. Took me less than 12 minutes to download.

Time to download 15% of Mac OS X from Apple on small business DSL on launch day, based on current ongoing experience: 4 hours and counting.

I bought and downloaded ML already yesterday evening, and it also took me about 5 hours to download – and I also don't have a slow connection (4 GB usually take around 45 minutes, depending on the source). I'll grant that the MAS probably was totally overrun yesterday, but my experiences so far with downloading an OS from Apple aren't too good: I had to re-install Lion on my Mac mini once (long story) from the recovery partition. What usually would have taken roughly an hour, maybe an hour and a half (popping in the DVD, clicking "install", wait), took me six frigging hours because the installer had to download all the crap first.

"We do what we must, because we can."
"Gaming on a Mac is like women on the internet." — "Highly common and totally awesome?"

for some people... maybe. For some people its faster since local stores don't always have stock the first day, or run out. Its also much cheaper than it was years ago. But you still gloss over the whole fact that going to the local store you actually have to spend your own time doing the acquiring, thats a HUGE difference and a great thing about digital copies. This is also not unique to Apple but the whole software world.

I'm glossing over it because while I suppose leaving the house to get something could be considered huge hassle, I can't download groceries, gasoline, or ammunition, so swinging by the store to pick up a physical copy of software too really doesn't bother me that much. Especially if I wanted to play with Mountain Lion yesterday evening (which I did) instead of this morning. And maxing out my connection would be about 700K/sec, so obviously it wasn't me that was the problem; I should've had it in an hour and 20 minutes. Although that's still more time than swinging by the local Apple Store would have taken me.

My point is I'm totally cool with downloads being an option. But I like physical copies being an option too for when I consider waiting on a download annoying and the server that's dishing those downloads out is already swamped. Downloads only with no other options really sucks. It'll likely suck less soon considering my business connection will probably get bumped to 22 megabit in the near future, but only if the server isn't swamped. Then, as now, it won't matter how fast my connection is if Apple's only serving up about 400MB/hour. Yes, I could go do something else. But maybe my work's done for the day, I want to play with ML now, and I don't have something better to do.

Same reason I don't do downloadable movies... I either have to severely compromise quality, or download 25-50 gigabytes (currently not an option from anywhere anyway). Or I can stop by a store for a BD on the way home, and done.

When everybody's got 50 megabit connections and servers can serve up data that fast even when there's high demand, I'll be onboard with the downloadable-only people. Until then, download-only for multigigabyte stuff = blah.